Italo Scanga

Born: 1932 in Calabria, Italy, Died 2001

All of us at Shark’s Ink. were deeply saddened by Italo Scanga’s death on July 27th, 2001. We had worked very closely with him on print projects in 1987, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1995. Italo’s enthusiastic spirit, pure enjoyment of life, food, music and making of art inspired us all and made him a joy to know and work with. We are very proud of the work that we did together and it will always be a reminder of our friendship.

Italo Scanga was a painter, sculptor and printmaker. After a childhood spent in Italy, Scanga matured as an artist in his adopted home, the United States. He was a prolific artist who worked in many mediums, combining found objects and altered objects with sculpted or painted elements. Religion, culture and history were major themes in the monotypes and lithographs that Scanga produced at Shark’s Inc. since 1987. He used images of saints, fruits and vegetables, vases and landscape, to evoke a sensuous, poetic connection to everyday life and its social meaning. Scanga often used found materials, such as old engravings, as collage elements in his prints. Rich layers of color and texture form bold patterns uniting the images of peppers, cherries, trees, and saints, in his large lithograph “Celeste”.

Italo Scanga was Professor of Visual Art at the University of California, San Diego, and his work was shown widely. He is represented in the collections of the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, NY, The Metropolitan Museum, NY, the Museum of Modern Art, NY and numerous others.